GTA Online’s load times are infamous for being incredibly long, leaving players waiting for upwards of 5 minutes before connecting. Thankfully, those days seem as though they may be behind us thanks to the hard work of a fan, and Rockstar’s willingness to incorporate an external fix to make getting online much faster.

A programmer by the name of t0st recently set out to delve into the issue of the long load times within GTA Online and found that with his hardware it took approximately 6 minutes gfor them to connect. As t0st dug into the code, it was discovered that there were some specific parts of the code that were to blame for the lengthy wait. Firstly, the game was reading text files for every single purchasable item within the game by counting each individual character. The game then records all the information that was read as a way to deter against duplicating items. Without having any items to begin with that could be duplicated, this adds up to a lot of wasted time performing nearly 2 billion checks of information that doesn’t seem to exist in the first place.

After inserting his own code to amend these peculiar issues the programmer was able to cut down the load times by a considerable amount. Eventually, the fix that t0st presented was seen by Rockstar, who decided to officially implement a patch that would follow t0st’s work in the hopes of cutting down load times. Now the patch is live and has been confirmed by t0st to be capable of allowing players to go from the Rockstar logo to being fully online in under 2 minutes. t0st also mentioned that he was granted a $10k through Rockstar’s H1 in-game bounty, alongside the team thanking the programmer in the latest patch update.

Not only does this patch work for PC players, but thanks to t0st working on the game’s code itself, he was able to create a solution for console players as well. Grand Theft Auto V and GTA Online are currently available for PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, and PlayStation 5. Let us know your thoughts on t0st’s work and Rockstar implementing his fix into an official patch in the comments section below. As always, don’t forget to follow Don’t Feed the Gamers on Twitter for 24/7 coverage of all things gaming and entertainment.

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